That I Might See
by Pilar
Summary: A Liz Parker future POV story


That I Might See _Disclaimer:_If there was a chance that I had any claim over the characters and canon elements of this story, I would probably sue everyone else that wrote fan fiction. But, no. They're not mine and I mean no infringement with this harmless piece of fic.

_Rating:_R, for adult situations. 

_Author's Note:_The background of this story starts mid-season two after "Wipeout" or so and leaves canon behind after that.

_Feedback:_Another kinda strange one for me, so I'd love to know what you think. Please [write me][1] and give me your thoughts.

* * *

**That I Might See**  
**Prologue**  
**by [Pilar][1]**

Pain is like heat. It sounds contrived and cliché, but I know that it's true. When the air is really hot, the heat envelops your entire body and makes it hard for you to breathe. It's exactly the same for pain. When something hurts, your initial reaction is to pull away from the source as fast as you can. Same for heat. And they each spread and stay with you as a memory. Sometimes, you're scarred. 

Every kind of pain is the same. From the smallest paper cut to the devastation you'll feel when you're forced to watch the people that you've loved the most die. There are barely any varying degrees. Pain is pain however you look at it and even if it's insignificant, it still hurts and that's all that matters. It depends only on the moment. 

We watched them die and there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it. We could only stand there, feet glued to the ground, terror written all over our faces. 

I haven't been able to talk about it since then. Neither of us has, but one look at each other's face and the entire scene unfolds again and again. I know that we both need to get past it, attempt to move on with our lives or some such trite crap that I would probably hear from my therapist if I was ever able to talk to her about anything. But we can't do that either. 

Yes, I am mature enough to know that I need help. But not so mature that I can actually face that help head on. So, for ages, I've been paying this woman a full night's tips to sit silently in her office and listen to her babble on about denial. And when I walk out of her office, I go right to the secretary and make another appointment. 

And I doubt that I'll say anything during that one either. 

For a while, I think we both believed that it was our fault, that we could have done something to prevent what happened. Or, maybe, we thought we should have gone down with them. 

I don't believe that anymore, at least not usually. I've traveled through all of the prescribed stages of my grief and found myself right back at the denial. But it can't be denial if I know it is, right? 

And every night when I lie down in the bed I've slept in since I was a child, the same bed I am so afraid to ever leave, I see it all happen again in my dreams. Sometimes in slow motion, sometimes as fast as it actually happened. Usually, I wake up screaming. 

They're used to it by now. My mother used to run into my room and hold me while I sobbed and stay with me until I fell asleep. These days, I just sit in my bed for an hour or so until the shaking wears off and I know I can sleep again. Until the next time. 

They'll never understand -- they didn't have to see it all play out in front of them. They didn't have to hear it in their ears and in the deepest bits of their brains and feel every single moment of it. 

So little has been said about it. The truth was covered by faked evidence and lies that we both helped to create in the stressed hours right after it happened. How we pulled it together, I still don't know. I guess we were just running on auto-pilot and trying to cover everyone's asses. It wouldn't have mattered. They were dead. 

Nothing has really mattered since. 

* * *

**That I Might See**  
**Part One**  


* * *

"Hey."

I can't even manage a polite 'hey' when he walks into the diner and sits down at the counter right behind where I clean the soda machine. I'd like to, but the words catch in my larynx and my mouth hangs open silently. I'd like to be able to turn around and look at him, but I can't even do that. 

"Liz?"

He presses me. After all this time, you'd think I'd be able to just look him in the eye, but even the sound of his voice on two syllables is more than I can bear. I've avoided this moment for almost two years; I can go two more. 

"We're closed." _Please don't make me turn around, I can't do it. Don't make me see their death in your eyes._

"Liz. I can't do this anymore." _And I can't do this yet. But, I swear, I'm trying. _

I've buffed the same spot on the soda tap about twenty-one times. Once for every year I've been alive. Almost. Not that I'm counting. 

"Please, Liz..." His voice is so thin, strained. "You're the only one I have..." He pleads solemnly to the back of my head. 

"I'm sorry." The tears that are always hanging on the edges of my eyes overflow and drip to the chrome. I wipe them away from the surface with perfectly circular swabs of my rag. _Clean the soda machine, Liz, just clean the machine and he'll eventually leave._

And eventually he does leave. I hear his rings clink against the counter and the chain on his wallet clank against the side of the stool when he stands. Eight seconds longer staring into my hair and hoping I'll talk to him. Twenty-three steps to the front door, the tinkle of the tiny bell and the lock clicking back into place so he leaves me just as he found me.

Locked inside. 

Nice. I'm becoming nothing more than a mountain of clichés and denial. 

I can't turn around even after I know he's long gone. I'm terrified that I'll still see him sitting in that spot. Another vision to add to the rest of the ghosts. 

One day, maybe, I'll be all cried out. Until then, tears never fail me. 

* * *

We were nineteen when it happened and, for me, time has stood still ever since. Nothing about me has changed, except everything. But the physical things, they're all precisely the same. The college applications I was finally going to submit still sit in their envelopes on my desk, my teddy bear stares at me from my nightstand where he stands court with the row of pictures I'm lucky to even have got in the first place. I still wear my hair the way that he liked it. 

And in a little over a week, I'll be twenty-one. 

I would have thought that by now I would be almost through with undergrad studies and looking for a school to do my post-graduate work at. I would have been far away from Roswell, New Mexico and calling home every few weeks with reports of good grades and fun parties and a decent job that pays the bills but doesn't interfere with my schooling. 

Instead, here I am in exactly the same place that I've been forever. Same job. Same girl. Only now, everyone looks at me with that expression that only says 'Poor Liz. I thought she'd be a doctor by now.' They watched me grow up, they had the same dreams for me as I did. 

Dreams killed at the same time they were. 

I can't say it yet. 

But, I swear, I'm trying. 

He watches me from my window some nights. I feel him there. And every one of those nights, I tell myself over and over to turn around and show him that I'm awake, that I know that we should talk about this, talk about that day, talk about every day since. And every one of those nights, I cry noiselessly into my pillow and try not to shake. 

I'm so sorry. 

I'm sorry for both of us. I'm sorry for them. And I'm sorry for the rest of the world who will never get to know us; we could have been decent. 

I feel so self-important. I've made all of this about me when everything should have been about them. But, then, he and I are the only ones left, so who else should it really be about?

Again. I'm so sorry. In so many ways. 

* * *

"Javier? What's the E.T.A. on those burgers?"

"They're coming now, Liz, two minutes." Javier always smiles at me; it makes me feel half-alive. Then, I realize that he's only trying to make me smile too and the chance of that is slim. I let him down every time. I let everyone down all of the time. 

I stand in the window and for just a millisecond forget everything. It's like that deep in auto-pilot, I forget everything except being a waitress and running mediocre food around in circles. Sixteen steps from the kitchen to table seven, eight more steps to table four, twelve from there to the counter. 

"Please talk to me, Liz." His fingers wrap around my wrist and I'm paralyzed. Auto-pilot must have blinded me. Or maybe it was the denial. Maybe they're the same thing. 

The bile raises in the back of my throat and the tears well in my eyes. Again. I can't run from all my customers and I can't leave Javier and Missy to take care of the whole place again. I've done this to them too many times. I've run too many times. 

"Please, Michael... Not now." Just saying his name is enough to bring it all back. 

Michael has changed in all the ways that I haven't. His skin is more weathered than I remember it, his eyes darker and coarse. And his hair is long; a short patch of beard grows under his lip. If he passed me in the street, for a moment I might not even recognize him. 

Everything that I've not done to remain exactly the same person I was the day before they were taken from us, is everything he's done to make sure that that person hardly existed. 

"Later, then. Liz?" I can deal with later. Later I won't have been caught off-guard and pushed into a corner where I have to watch the tiny filmstrip loop repeatedly between us. Later I can disappear into my bathroom and cry on the tile floor until my head hurts so badly and I can finally fall asleep. Later, I can blow him off and we can dance this one again another time. 

"Later." His fingers finally release me but I still feel the pressure where they had gripped. 

I wonder why he hasn't left Roswell as far behind him as he's left the boy he once was. 

I know why I'm still here. 

I crave the protection of my parents and the day to day predictability that I lost when we were all still in high school. Everything is predictable now and nothing changes. Mrs. Rodriguez sits at the counter everyday at four o'clock sharp and orders the early bird special, whatever it is, and a cup of decaf that she'll ask for three refills on. Sheriff Valenti comes in for lunch every afternoon and Missy takes care of him because he's just another ghost to me whose face I can't look into. 

He stopped trying a long time ago. Good man. 

Nineteen stairs up to our apartment, seventeen steps to my bedroom, another three to my bed. Missy and Javier can handle an hour downstairs by themselves between the lunch and afternoon rushes. My father will pick anything up that needs to be covered and he'll never mention to me that I shouldn't have disappeared. 

An hour is nothing in the scheme of things. 

It's later that I worry about while my head is buried in my pillow and my bedroom is closed from the light. I hope that if I lie here long enough, later will pass me right by. 

When I go back downstairs, the diner is near empty. I marry ketchup bottles on the counter until the next rush starts. Javier makes me a turkey burger because, left to my own devices, I probably won't feed myself and he knows it. They all take care of me in one way or another, feeding the different bits of me that I need fed. 

Even Michael nourishes a part of me. Knowing that he's out there and that some part of him needs me -- just knowing that allows me to turn my back on him. I must like him out there. 

As I take my last, mechanical bite and the plate is clean, the first group of dinner customers arrives. I can slip easily into auto-pilot for the next two hours at the least. This is how I move from day through day and start again. Routine can do wonders for pain. 

* * *

"Liz, we're never going to get anywhere in these sessions if you don't let go of your silence. I think you need to find another psychotherapist, someone who maybe you'll trust more, don't you think?"

I could answer her with the same silence she's been used to, but part of my main objective -- keeping things exactly the same -- is keeping her the same. I answer her quietly, not wanting to shock her with the sound of my voice. 

"I do trust you, Diana. I just can't talk about events and talking about events is the only thing that I'm here for. I don't want to bore you with the day to day monotony of my life." Maybe not the best words, but words nonetheless. 

She lets out a long breath and swivels her chair around to face me, exhausted. "I'm glad that you feel like you can trust me. Ever since the first time we met, I've been glad that you know that you need help, know that you can't get through this alone. But, Liz, we've been meeting twice a week for over a year now and we're no closer to getting you through this. I can't help but think that maybe you don't want to. Your depression has become all-encompassing, and short of putting you on anti-depressants, I don't know what else we can do here. How do you feel about that?"

Everything always ends with 'How do you feel about that?' I know how I feel about that. But that's not exactly what she's looking to hear. 

"You think that drugs would change anything?" I don't want drugs; I know this isn't about pharmaceuticals or brain chemistry. 

"Honestly, Liz, I don't know. Anti-depressants can help a lot of people, but I'm not sure of anything with you anymore. I know so little about what's hurting you, and until you can face those things head on, you're not going to be able to move forward and I can't help you. You're not letting me help you."

"I'm sorry. Please don't fire me, Diana. I need this in my life." I've never been fired from anything before, seeing as I've never had a job outside of the family, but that was what her little diatribe seemed to be saying. And I do need this. I need this more than she can possibly know. 

"Liz, I don't want you to think of this as rejection, but all these sessions ever amount to is me spouting off everything I learned in school about psychoanalysis and you staring at me as if I had six heads. We're going nowhere and I can't keep taking your money. I can refer you to another doctor, if you think that you might benefit from someone else's help, or we can start over and you can start talking to me. I can't help you if you never allow me to." She looks at me so earnestly. I almost feel bad for putting her through this and dragging her into my own private hell without showing her the sights. "You're so sad, Liz. I want to help bring you out of your sadness."

The doctor leans back into her chair and stares at me, waiting for me to say something. I think that she believes that she was finally making headway, at least this time I said something even though it wasn't really anything. I think that, in and of itself, surprises her. 

And maybe she is making headway. 

In a lot of ways, I'm tired of keeping this inside me. There's nothing more that I want than to push all of these memories out of my head, to stop seeing them in front my eyes during almost every waking moment. But I can't seem to bring myself to repeat them either. 

So we're back to square one. 

"Doctor, please... I'm trying..." It's the best that I can do and it's my biggest excuse. I placate and then stroke my denial. 

"All right, Liz... All right... But, from today forward, no more silence. You have got to talk to me." She looks at her watch and we both know that my time is up. I stand, cross the room and shake her hand and she nods at me, probably hoping that we've come to some sort of understanding. Then, I walk outside, write a check to the nice secretary, who always looks at me so sympathetically and comes into Crashdown every Sunday with her boyfriend for lunch, and set up the next appointment. 

Narrowly, I skirt another disastrous change. 

* * *

Michael is waiting for me at the curb in front of the office when I step outside. My entire body stiffens and I feel like I can't breathe, everything begins to shudder around me. I hate him. 

"I'm sorry for coming here, Liz. I had a feeling that if I tried to find you later that you'd just avoid me and I didn't want to let you do that this time." He gives me that same sympathetic look that everyone gives me, but his is laced with the same sorrow I see everyday in my own eyes. 

"Why not, Michael? Why not?" _Why does everyone seem to think that talking about the past will make it go away?_

Nothing will ever make this go away. 

For the briefest moment, I wonder how long he's been following me around and memorizing my schedule and then realize that I don't really care. 

My movements are robotic as he leads me along the darkening streets and neither of us speak. One by one, street lights are illuminated and the windows of the apartment houses brighten. It's only early evening, but it feels late. Summer is like that. 

Too late, not late enough. 

I don't even know why I'm following him, why I allow him to affect me at all, why I allow him to do anything. If I had never listened to him in the first place, maybe things would have turned out differently back then. He should know that himself. Meanwhile, we act like we know nothing when we know everything. 

And that's the problem. 

"Michael?" He turns at the sound of my feeble voice and he looks at me long and hard as if waiting for more. I don't know what I meant to say anymore. 

"It's been so long..." He leads me further and I finally realize that he's taking me to the apartment he still lives in. I guess some things don't change as much as I might have thought. It's been even longer since I've even been in this part of the neighborhood. 

He slips his key into the downstairs lock and holds the door open for me to enter. My pause is long and, try as he might not to, he still looks impatient. Against every iota of best judgement, I cross past him and make my way up the stairs. It has been a long time, but not so long that I've forgotten my way. 

When we arrive at his door, I'm frozen again. The last time I stood inside his four walls was the last time I ever wanted to, and roughly thirty minutes later everything we both knew as our lives ended. It all comes flooding back in a spread of painful heat across my stomach just standing in front of the open door. I feel like I may vomit. 

"I can't... I can't... I can't..." I start to turn to run back down the stairs and outside and away, but Michael is on me immediately, his arms wrapping around mine and his body holding me fast against his. My heart slams in my chest and I can hear its pounding in my eardrums. 

"You can. Liz, there are no ghosts here..." My knees go out under me and I feel my body limp in his embrace. He leads me inside and to the sofa and sits me down backing away slowly. Strange how he's so unrelenting and so passive at the same time. 

The couch is new, at least new to him; I don't remember the orange and brown weave. Almost everything around me is different, I have no memory of the chrome and glass coffee table that sits in front of me or the bookshelf that stands against the far wall filled with books. Michael watches me with squinted eyes and pursed lips, almost the boy that I knew, but so much older in so little time. 

That makes two of us, except I haven't grown a day. 

"You want something to drink?" He's wringing his hands and moving back and forth slowly in one spot. Somehow, watching him act as nervous as I feel makes all the difference. I find it almost soothing. As soothing as sitting here can possibly be. 

"What do you have?" Anything to postpone the inevitable. I should call my parents, let them know I'm okay. Up until tonight, you could have tracked my comings and goings like clockwork and they're probably just about starting to worry for my whereabouts. Like a lot of things, I also can't remember the last time I wasn't exactly where I was supposed to be when I was supposed to be. 

Michael lists off half a refrigerator of beverage choices and I nod somewhere in the middle of his words not really paying attention to what I've just agreed to drink and not caring either way. When he brings me back a stolen pint glass filled with juice, I ask to use the phone, further prolonging our agony. 

My parents sound pleased that I've done something to change my patterned behavior and when I hand Michael back the phone, he takes a deep, deep breath and stares down at his hands. 

"Two years next week and then, your birthday."

"I know." Of course I know. I've been counting down each day as it passes me by. "And?"

He moves just slightly closer to me and I want to inch further away. 

"And it never gets any better, does it?" I've never known him to be so sincere, or at least I never thought that he was or that he even had it in him. In my mind, Michael always had an ulterior motive to everything, always had his own interests in mind. 

"Not so far. But we both know that... So why am I here, Michael? Why have you dragged me here to make me feel worse?" I know that's not his true intention. I know that Michael doesn't want to hurt me more and that he doesn't want to feel this way either, but trivial calendar reminders aren't what we're here for and I know that too. 

"You scream out in your sleep almost every night and I hardly sleep at all, there's got to be a way to drown out the demons, Liz." I can smell him now, he's so close and I think that he's using every ounce of strength he has in him not to touch me. Even when we were close, we weren't very close. And at the end, I don't know what we were. 

"This is stupid, Michael. I want to go home." When I get scared, when I get angry, when I remember back to the last day, I only want the darkness of my own bedroom and the safety of my blankets. I'm so angry and so scared, and I remember it all so well. 

"Please, Liz... I feel like if we talk about it..." Sometimes he's so helpless, like a child. I remember Maria telling me once how he cried in her arms and she held him until the shaking stopped and he fell asleep. It must have been a lot like this moment. 

But the Michael that I knew wasn't that Michael. There was nothing defenseless about him, nothing quiescent and nothing constant. The Michael that I remember was uncontrollable and angry and spiteful. The Michael that I knew didn't cry and didn't apologize and would never beg. 

We buried that Michael when we buried what was left of the rest of them and what's missing of me. 

"Tell me that it wasn't our fault." He stares into my eyes as if I might possibly know something that he doesn't. 

"I can't do that, Michael. I try to tell myself the same thing everyday and I haven't started believing it yet. Maybe it's not our fault directly, and maybe we should have been there and died along with them, but I don't know... I just don't know." His red eyes fill with tears and his mouth quivers and his body trembles. I want to reach out for him, but I don't. 

The Michael I pretend to remember wouldn't have wanted me to. 

He inches slightly closer and I don't move away this time. The very least that I can do is be the warm body he needs near him, even if I'm unreceptive and mostly cold. But every inch nearer reminds me of how alone I've been myself and how much I've missed human proximity. 

We've missed out on so much. 

Sometimes, I curse the day that Max brought me back to life just to end my life and begin it again and end it again and then to end it completely. Had he just let me die the first time, I wouldn't be here now wishing for life or death and not this cross between the two. 

The heat from outside permeates the stale air around us. And even though Michael has turned on the fan and it oscillates near the window, the heat only grows. When he takes off his long-sleeved flannel, leaving him in only an undershirt, I see the scars. Long, thin, purposeful; they snake over his forearms and biceps and into his tank. I pretend not to notice. 

I've hurt myself too, more than a few times. I've put my fist through the window of my bedroom and paid off the glazier so he wouldn't tell my parents each of the three times I've had him come to fix the panes. I understand where that comes from, not that I'm proud of it. My only wonder is why he doesn't heal himself, but then I realize that for Michael, part of trying to forget must be fighting to remember. 

"It would be too easy to kill yourself, wouldn't it?" My words leave my mouth before I can stop them and I regret their being said almost immediately. 

"I've thought about it, but then I think I'd be letting us all down and I can't do that. I've done that enough. Can I show you something?" He pulls away slightly and looks into my eyes again as I struggle to avert them. Looking too deeply hurts too much. 

I do see Max inside him, and Isabel and Tess too; even a little bit of Maria is left in there. I suppose he sees her inside me as well, but it's not as easy to recognize. 

"Do I want to see it?" Probably not. 

He reaches under the couch cushion behind him and pulls out a black book like one of those bound sketchpads they sell at the art supply store. It's worn from handling and pages written, read and re-read. He places it on my lap and leaves his hand heavy on top of it, pressing it into my legs. 

"Take it home with you, I want you to read it." He has that pleading look in his eyes again and it tears me apart. I nod just perceptibly, knowing that I won't read it. Not yet. 

"I don't know if I can, Michael." In the time that I've been sitting next to him, I've gotten used to the sound of his name again. It's been years since I've said it aloud, but it slides from my lips easily now. It's almost nice. Every time I've heard it inside my mind it was spit with ugliness. 

"Please, Liz, try... I read your journal once, so long ago, and it made me feel sorta better. Maybe mine can do the same for you." He thinks that referring to a better part of the past will remind me that things weren't always so abysmal. He's trying to play me, but it's not working. 

"No, that's not why you want me to read it." And it isn't, this is all for him, what he wants. "You want me to try and live this through your head for a while, for you to feel better because you've forced me to see your rationalizations and the way that you've come to terms with them. No. Screw you, Michael, I won't do it your way. And the worst part is, I don't even know why you think that I can free you from this. It has nothing to do with me."

For once, my voice is strong, almost a screech, and so loud. Michael winces but doesn't remove his hand from the book on my thighs. Instead, he waits, knowing that when I do go, the book will come with me and eventually I will read his words. I won't be able to help myself. 

"You know, Liz. This is all bullshit. It's all about you. I want to move forward... Do you have any fucking idea how many times I've tried to move away, to get Roswell completely out of my mind and put everything in the fucking past? Jesus Christ..." He's tired of placating me. His fingers tear through his hair as he pulls it away from his face and his voice carries further than mine had. "But I can't. I can't leave and I can't move on and I can't fucking do anything, and that, if nothing else, is entirely your fault. I can't leave, because you won't. And I can't move on, because you won't. And every goddamn day, I wonder why I even give a shit about you when I can barely care about myself."

He's won my silence in his honesty. 

"Everything has always been your way, Liz. Everything... So don't tell me that you won't do it my way, it's just bullshit. I don't even have a way anymore."

And he's probably right, but I didn't make it that way. That was his choice. 

He gets up and paces around the room maniacally looking as if he might hit something or toss something hard around the room. I wait patiently for his crash, bracing myself, but nothing comes. Poor Michael, flaccid in his anger, just because of me. 

"I'm going home." Better to just get out of here and try to forget all about it, right? 

He nods and when I close his door behind me, I wait on the outside stairs and listen closely for whatever he held back while I was still inside. He doesn't fail me. He never does, and he probably never will. In that way, we're exactly the same. 

I walk the long way back to town and stop more than once to collect my thoughts and cry onto the cover of Michael's journal. When I've finally gotten it together enough to walk through my own front door, I tuck it under my arm and go home. 

We've gotten nowhere. 

* * *

**That I Might See**  
**Part Two**  


* * *

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Liz Parker. Her life was nothing extraordinary: she dated some nice boys, did extremely well in school and had some very close friends that she knew she could tell anything to. Then, one, dark day, she died. But dying was too easy for Liz Parker and a boy that she only knew from school brought her back from death. 

And everything changed. 

To the friends that she could always say anything, she found she could only lie. And the boy that she knew from school wasn't a real boy. God forbid anything was ever easy for Liz Parker. The boy was from another planet and she loved him. That was easy. The loving him came easy. But nothing else did, and little Liz Parker's life as she knew it was over. 

Forget teen angst and anything normal; normal was long gone. But why let it stay simple for anyone else? No, that too would have been too easy, Liz Parker had to take everyone around her down with her. She couldn't lie to her friends; she had to drag them into her melodrama so that no one else's lives could ever be ordinary again. 

And even all of that eventually became normal. 

It was normal that the man that she fell in love with's cells weren't human and that he could manipulate matter with the touch of his fingertips. Molecular structure be damned. And everyone looked to pair up, his best friend and her best friend, his sister and the friend close enough to be her brother. None were so unrequited as she and he, even if they had the closest thing to a relationship as any of them. 

And none of them hurt like Liz Parker. 

The boy had words like King and destiny and home planet. Liz Parker didn't fit in to any of those things. 

But the boy didn't care about those things and didn't care to repeat history and didn't think that destiny meant anything unless it had to do with Liz Parker. And although she had tried to forget about him, without him allowing her that, she couldn't. And she loved him as much as he loved her. 

It could have been a fairytale, this fairytale. 

When her lover of the future came back from the future to tell her that they could never love, she listened to him and tried to change it in so many ways. 

When he said that the entire world would come crashing down around them unless her lover didn't love her, she believed him. And although her heart would always be his, she took his heart and crushed it in her hands. 

And nothing was ever the same after that. 

Their connection wouldn't break though, no matter how deeply she hurt him. And the fear of Armageddon can force a girl to stoop to lows she never thought possible. 

Imagine knowing that being in love with the boy that you're in love with could bring the end of the world, that's the stuff of fairytales. 

For two years, they danced that dance. Back and forth she played with him, she would allow herself to forget prophecy and that destiny really did exist and he would get closer to her and love her more. Then, memory would correct her and she would push him away, but still he loved her. He went on always loving her. 

You see, Liz Parker was a nice girl. She couldn't help it. And nothing Liz Parker could do to make the boy not love her was bad enough for it to actually stick. 

And when she'd thought that she'd really tried absolutely everything, sweet, little Liz Parker had herself an idea. 

* * *

_July 10, 2002_

_It's dark and she's not used to wandering around late at night alone, but if she's going to do this, she knows that she has to do it now. She has to start planting the seed early and make sure that he takes her bait. And then, Max will finally see that they're not supposed to be together. _

She pushes thick tears from her eyes and pauses outside the apartment building looking up towards his window. If she thinks too hard, she'll never be able to go through with it. With a heavy finger, she leans hard and long on the buzzer and waits for his sleepy voice to answer. 

The timing has to be just right. 

"Yeah? Who's there?" He sounds as angry and as sleepy through the intercom as she knew he would be. Maria has her own set of keys and the rest of them would probably just trick the lock. Alex only comes here when he has to. 

"It's Liz, Michael. Can I come up?" She tries to sound agitated, like something has gone terribly wrong. She needs to mask the desperation that she knows would be in her natural voice. 

"Shit, Liz. Do you know what time it is?" He only cares about himself, she reminds herself for the thousandth time. That's one of the reasons that she knows that this will work. 

"Please, Michael..." She lets her words trail off and hears the door buzz her entry. One last look behind her and she takes the stairs two at a time. 

* * *

It's hard to think with this book staring at me from across my room, but I don't want to know what's inside it. 

I toss and turn for hours before I can sleep. The requisite cry is over and done with and the nightmare yet to come, if I can ever close my eyes. I hear his voice now, where I would normally hear my own or the blast or the screaming. Michael challenges me. Michael scares me. I don't want to know what's inside Michael. 

Does he recall back to the days before they all died? How far back do the words go? Does he blame her as much as she does? Will he sit near her window again tonight, waiting to see if she'll read? Does he think that if she reads his nightmares, then hers will suddenly stop? 

I try to feel, but there's nothing left inside me tonight. And I don't want to think anymore. 

* * *

My father is behind the grill today, my mother upstairs doing the laundry and I am where I always am, taking the breakfast orders and running around the diner making sure that everyone has exactly what they need. 

If only it were that easy for me. Give someone with a check pad my list of requests and have them delivered to me in less than ten minutes. Must be nice. But my requests are a little more demanding than orders of UFOmelets and sides of Alien Skins and I don't think that any server in the world could dish me up a pile of no remorse with a side of getting my friends back. 

Seven steps from the kitchen window to table three, refills all around. Three steps to the next table. 

"Good morning, Liz."

"How are you this morning, Mr. Jameson? The usual today?"

"Actually, I think it's time for a change, don't you?" _No, not really, I've had enough change this week thank you, I would like for everything to go back to being exactly the same. But thanks a heap anyway. _ He smiles at me sweetly, not knowing how I really perceive his question. How would he know? How would anyone know? 

"Everyone needs a change now and then, so what will it be today?" Big, fake smile and pen poised on pad. 

"Bring me the Shatner Breakfast Special, please, with extra green onions and a side of Spock Slabs. And coffee, please."

"Coming right up." I flash him another smile; I've gotten so good at the smiles that have no meaning beyond politeness. 

The book is still up there; I can hear it taunting me through the ceiling. That's where my thoughts have been in the three days since Michael pressed it to my lap and forced me to take it with me back here. The first morning, I tried to hide it among my other books, but its pitch black spine grinned at me from there and it stood out too far. 

I moved it to between the mattress and the box spring, but I could feel it there like the princess felt the pea. 

So, it's back on my desk, riding the pile of college applications and never to be processed checks. And I can hear it from down here, beckoning me inside its covers. Maybe tonight, but I doubt it. 

I keep expecting Michael to show up to press the issue further, but he's staying away. He hasn't been to my rooftop either, and that's made sleeping even more difficult. 

Maybe just handing it to me was what he needed to chase the ghosts away. Maybe I am the proud owner of his ghosts as well as my own now. I wouldn't put it past him and I've seen them roaming my halls these nights. Maybe he's finally long gone from this place. 

But, somehow, I doubt it. I feel like I would know. 

Last night, I dreamt of Tess. I dreamt about the first time she came to Roswell and we didn't know anything about her. I dreamt of how her curled blonde hair framed her face and how Max put his hands on either side of it when he kissed her in the rain. I dreamt of how her scream was the loudest of all of theirs and carried through the cave and out to the desert to disappear in the dry air. 

Michael held me behind him when it happened, and he tried so hard to stop it with one outstretched hand. 

I don't dream of Michael. Ever. 

When the breakfast crowd has thinned, I go upstairs and I sit on my bed and stare at the book never approaching it. Missy will be in soon and I've got the rest of the day off. I'm not a fan of the day off and I have three of them every week, they won't let me not take them. They think that I'll find something to do outside of running the same errands and going to therapy appointments that make no difference. They think that I'll change my habits. They think. So do I. 

Routine. So safe and secure and so boring. 

Remember when life was everything except boring? Remember when life was a life? Life is supposed to be more than just a succession of events that bring you from morning through the day into the night and back, life is supposed to be filled. My life has become nothing but dead air. 

I might be tired of it. I know it tires me. 

* * *

My therapist thinks that we've entered a new era. I hate to prove her desperately wrong, but I'm sure I'm going to soon. It's been only two minutes since I walked into her office and took my usual seat on the Freudian leather couch and put my heels on the edge of the oak coffee table beside the ever-present box of Kleenex. At least, nothing else has diverged from the norm here. 

She looks at me as if she's waiting for something, it's a look I've become used to but I feel like this time she's really waiting. I think we both hold our breath. I really have nothing to say. 

"So, Liz, a long time ago you told me that you had nightmares, do you still have them?" She's fishing. 

"Sometimes." I lie. "But they're not as bad now, they've gotten better." I really do lie. My nightmares may not have gotten worse, but they've not gotten better either. Only thing is, these days I know what to expect. Not that they don't still surprise me. 

"Do you want to talk about them?"

"Not particularly." I let out an exhausted breath. I've done nearly nothing all day, but my bones ache and my head is heavy. "You know, I think I'm coming down with something, I should just reschedule and come in another day."

Oh, I know she's not going to let me off that easy, but when it starts to get even the slightest bit rough, my entire body just gives out and tells me to flee. 

"Liz, I thought that we were going to try here. You don't have to talk about anything you don't want to, but we're going to have to try to get through things, or we're just going to be back where we ended things last week."

There's a long pause where we both try to think of something to say. 

"Do you want to talk about the man who picked you up here last time? Are you seeing him?" She throws her pole out again. 

"No." I answer too loud and too quickly. Backing off, I summarize without saying anything. It's best that way. "He's an old friend, we hadn't seen each other in a long time..." She knows that I'm hedging, but hell, this is more than she's gotten from me in ages. "He was with me when our friends were killed, we saw it together." I should have maybe left that out. 

"Oh? And how does it feel seeing him again? Has he been away from Roswell for a long time?"

This is the part I can't say; this is the part I don't want to know myself. 

"He's lived here his whole life," I tell her plainly. "We were never close before it happened, so we don't really see each other very often. He lives on the other side of town." They're not lies, but they're only half-truths. 

Michael and I never were close. But even when our lives all crossed and our lines were drawn in the sand, we had an understanding of each other that was unspoken and didn't need to be. Maybe it was because we both loved Max; maybe it was because he knew that if he hurt Maria I would hurt him back. Maybe it was just because we had no choice but tolerate each other. Toleration can bring two people very close at times. 

He never forgave me for backing from the circle when it was him who almost died. 

I never forgave myself for being afraid. 

"What brought the two of you together this time?" She watches me and jots on her pad in shorthand I strain to read. 

"He wanted to talk. He wanted to remind me that it will be two years next Wednesday. We went back to his apartment, we talked for a little while and I went home. It was nothing."

I try to convince myself that it was nothing, but nothing is as far from the truth as I could possibly get. That nothing two-hour visit was enough to turn my entire life upside down and back again. I've been doing everything doubly hard to try to make it feel like it meant nothing. And it hasn't worked. 

"I have a hard time believing that. When I mentioned him to you, for a moment you froze, then you began to answer. Why did it first upset you?" Oh, the psychoanalysis crap really does get me sometimes. Her methods are so perceptible. Rote. 

"To be honest, I didn't think that you watched me leave your office, Doctor. I was surprised that you saw him and I meet outside." I feel my eyes squint in challenge. Sometimes, the lengths I'll go to avoid the real issues amaze even me. 

"Oh, Liz, please." She sees right through me, obviously. At least I haven't chosen a stupid therapist to not help me. "I stood near the window and happened to see you talking to a man and walk off with him. And you were clearly troubled by it, I could tell that from all the way up here. I think you should talk about it. You never know, Liz, it could help. And that **is** what we're here for, after all."

I can tell that I infuriate her sometimes, as hard as she tries to hide it. No matter, this isn't about her. 

And I have nothing to give her on this one, at least nothing that I care to expound on right now. Having to dig too deeply into why just seeing him standing in front of me started the tremor in my bones would force me to understand it myself. Too much of the unsaid would have to be unearthed. I'm not really ready yet to disinter the dead. 

"Anything having to do with what happened just shakes me. It's not just seeing Michael. It's everything. I don't want to think about any of it." Another long breath. But at least this time, I'm not lying and not omitting the truth. They're not the same thing. 

* * *

In retrospect, maybe I can't talk about my feelings, ever, because I don't know what it is to feel anymore. 

I've been thinking about her question, about how it _felt_ to see Michael again, ever since she asked. And I still don't have an answer. Not just an answer that I can verbalize, or one that I want to, but an answer at all. I'm not sure if I felt anything other than fear. 

Fear is the only emotion that I can decipher anymore. I'm either dead empty or I'm afraid. And realizing that scares me even more. 

* * *

_July 10, 2002_

_He answers the door clad in boxer shorts and wifebeater and she doesn't know what else she had been expecting. It's after two a.m., had she expected him to be fully dressed? _

He ruffles his hair and wipes the sleep from his eyes. Perplexed, he stares at her from his doorway as she takes the last of the stairs slowly. He doesn't say a word, only that horrible gaze that he's always had that makes her feel like she's a rancid bug under a microscope. He never has liked her much. 

Which only makes this all the harder. 

"I'm sorry for waking you, Michael." She stands too close to him, too close even for herself. 

"Whatever." He steps out of her way and she walks past him and into the apartment as if it's natural for her to be there in the middle of the night. As if it's an everyday occurrence that she show up while he's in his underwear and they're alone in his space. 

She paces slowly around the living room; around the dingy, old sofabed that he got secondhand and the TV with its rabbit ear antennae and the ping pong table whose presence she's never understood. He watches her silently, irritated. He scratches his inner thigh and she nearly takes off. 

"What do you want, Liz?"

She remembers her purpose, why she dragged herself out of her safe home and walked all the way to his apartment in the dark. She had anticipated his questioning, but had never really worked out her own answers. Everything that she'd planned would just sound insipid actually coming out of her mouth. 

"Well... Michael... I know this is going to seem strange, especially since... well, you know... but... Michael..."

Sexy has never been her strong suit. Sexy has been the suit that hangs in her closet and has hardly ever been tried on, let alone worn outside. Sexy doesn't really fit; it hangs on her -- too big and too uncomfortable. 

But she wears it anyway tonight and scratches as it itches her tender skin. 

Michael, unfortunately, is nonplussed. He gives her that look that shows he doesn't even get it, that he doesn't even recognize what she's trying to say. As she inches closer to him and slowly, her hand trembling, reaches towards him, he captures her wrist in his fingers. 

"Are you making a play for me?" He laughs at her out loud and she winces. "Oh, this is rich... What's going on here, Liz? Maria on the other end of some hidden camera, watching to see if I'd take the bait? Smile... you're on Girlfriend Camera?"

Her voice raises slightly, like it always does when she gets agitated. 

"Michael... That's not it... That's not why I needed to see you... This isn't a joke and it has nothing to do with Maria. Nothing." But her hands are still quivering of their own accord and she can't seem to get control of them. And she's holding back tears that threaten to careen down her face. And he's still laughing at her. 

She should have known this would never work. 

She lets her tears fall and she shrinks to the threadbare arm of the couch and she buries her face in her hands. This was the last thing she could think of, the only thing that she thought might work. But her plan had not counted on Michael not responding to her. 

How could she have possibly have thought that she could seduce him? Michael is a man, and she's only Liz. 

Little, unsexy -- just a girl. 

He places his hand on her back as she weeps and she raises her eyes to his as he stutters some excuse for an apology. 

* * *

Therapy has become therapeutic. Go figure. 

Six times I've opened Michael's journal since coming to bed and I can't get past the first page. At least I've opened it at all. Six months ago, I wouldn't have gotten this far. Hell, six days ago. 

But tonight my fingertips are smudged with his charcoal and every single memory comes spewing back and it's exactly what I had feared. I can still hear them. 

I prefer avoidance. I really do. 

The first time, I kept the cover open the longest. I stared down at Michael's abstract lines and layers of shading and saw almost nothing but the charcoal. I had to concentrate until the image became apparent. Maybe I had pushed it out of my mind with so many other little details, it took so long to recognize. But it's burned there now. Again. As it always has been. Now changed. Now seen differently. Now seen through him. 

I dropped the book as if it had seared my fingers. 

I suppose I had thought that Michael had stopped sketching, that his art was only a momentary plot twist in our high school melodrama. That once he'd deciphered the meaning of his obsessive vision and we'd all gone to see Atherton's geodome, he'd never put pencil to paper and drawn again. I guess that I didn't think Michael needed a creative outlet like the rest of us. 

It was so long ago. My impressions of him have always been so far off. 

Although I hadn't said anything at the time, I never saw the harm in Michael's frantic talent. As far as school was concerned, it was the first accomplishment he had ever had. And even though his teacher didn't know what the images meant to Michael, the commendation probably meant just as much. 

Max had been over-conservative. But, then, he always was. 

Still, I really never thought Michael followed through with any of it. I never saw anything he'd drawn after the frenzied geodome phase and I never caught him sketching. I imagine I thought that, like everything else, he didn't care about it and he'd let it fall aside. Maria never mentioned it. 

I miss Maria so much. 

Again I flip open the cover and look down at his abstract and smudged impression of the granolith, wanting so badly to move to the next page but unable. Edge to edge he'd covered the page until it had curled under the pressure of his hand. 

For a long time, the granolith had been the last thing that I would see in my mind before I fell asleep. It symbolized so many things, none of them were ever symbols of good for me, even though I knew how much it meant to them. For me, it was the thing that would eventually take them all away from us. 

I had no idea how true that would be. 

Tomorrow, maybe, page two. 

* * *

**That I Might See**  
**Part Three**  


* * *

Little Liz Parker has put the whole goddamn story behind her. 

Or at least I keep trying to, but it keeps on rearing its ugly head and making me think about it all over again. That's the story of my life: all over again. 

Michael is right, of course. We should be trying to move on. But how do you move on when you have no idea which way forward is? I've been turning around for so long in the same spot, I've lost every way but up. 

I still remember up. I remember the way Max pointed his finger in that direction, his hand beside his face, his eyes so genuine and so filled with trust. Up was where he belonged, where his story should have ended. 

So, two days with Michael's journal in my bedroom and still nothing past the first page. I've sat with it in my hands, every intention to open it and see whatever it is Michael wants me to understand, but the cover is daunting enough. Pitiful. 

If the first page inspires such hell in me, chances are that every page could only get increasingly worse. 

Michael had never been one for halfway, it was one of the things that I'd admired about him. I forget sometimes that there were things that I did respect about Michael. I forget a lot of things, just not the right ones. 

One day, this turquoise uniform won't fit anymore. 

"Good morning, Javier." I say brightly as I unlock the front doors letting him inside and flipping over the sign in the window. I like Sundays, the diner is slow for the first couple of hours and customers come in slowly and linger at their tables longer. We slowly ramp up to hectic by noon as the brunch throng arrives. 

We keep a sign up sheet by the front door and as the tables empty, I call out new names loudly over the chattering of happy patrons. They're all names that I recognize and everyone greets me sweetly. I almost enjoy the sound of my own voice over the din of piped music and laughter. 

I look forward to Sundays. They remind me that I've made it through another week. 

And sometimes, I don't even think about what I'm missing. I sit outside while the first early customers file in and wrap my hands around a steaming cup of coffee, no matter what the weather is like. And I watch the couples and families in the street move past on their way to wherever they go to be together on a lazy day. 

And when the rush begins, I think about nothing else but taking care of them. 

I was never really the maternal type. I always wanted children and maybe I still do, but that's got nothing to do with what I'm trying to say now. I mean that I was never the type of person who felt like they needed to control all the situations or take care of everyone around me. 

For a while, we had Max for that. 

Max took care of all of us, even when he was being completely self-centered. 

And who could really blame his egotism and need for control? He was like that before he even found out that he was the King. 

History always repeats itself. History is redundant. 

* * *

Michael's handwriting is tiny and illegible and I am thankful for it. 

Page two and three and half of four, his first entry, took me long over an hour to read. Lines of type written in a black ballpoint hand with hardly any space between them. Lines of type written frenetically, pushing deep into the thick paper. Lines of type that I can barely read without becoming dizzy. 

The dizziness might be my fault. No matter how laborious it is, I can still make out the words. 

I still have no idea why I'm reading this or even why he wants me to. But I know that I can't sleep with its presence reminding me how much I'm avoiding. I'd like to think it will be cathartic, but so far it's merely things I don't want to remember and more Michael than I can really handle. 

I stopped writing in my journal shortly after he read it. 

It was no longer the diary that I had begun. Michael's taking it and reading my private thoughts had little to nothing to do with it in the end. I simply would have had to write too much. In retrospect, I wish I had kept writing in it, I might still remember the good things that happened during that time of my life rather than what I remember now. 

Now all I remember is the color of the flash that shot out of the crystal and sliced through them all. I remember the odor of burnt flesh in the air around us and the smell of my own singed hair. I remember feeling Michael's arm push me behind him and his body cover mine on the floor. And I remember their screams. 

But most of all, I remember the same thing that's written on Michael's first few pages. How it all felt. How it felt feeling it all as if I were not myself and not one but all of them at once. We felt their fear and their pain and their absolute horror. 

And we knew that we should have died with them because no one should ever have to feel that and have it not end with death. 

* * *

> And now I lay me down to sleep
> 
> _And wish for exhaustion to finally take me; damning myself, damning my life, damning my horrible luck_
> 
> I pray the lord
> 
> _Having given up on both, the latter took me longer to disbelieve than the former. But the former still feels good_
> 
> My soul to keep
> 
> _It all falls apart here, I am soulless. Inside me is nothing but dust. _
> 
> And if I die before I wake
> 
> _So be it and it's about damn time. And maybe the prayers I did say have finally been answered_
> 
> I pray the lord my soul to take
> 
> _Please._

* * *

It was different for Michael. He heard them just as loud and felt their torture as vividly as I did, but for Michael; so much more was lost. 

For Michael, death was the bottom of the mountain and there were miles more to climb ahead of him. He had always believed that he would be the one killed early, the one to slip up and make the fatal mistake. He believed that he would be the one to leave everyone behind to beat their chest and wonder why he had been taken. 

And he wrote it all down and never once did he ever think that he would be the one left behind. 

It wasn't only being left alone. It was being left alone here. Forever. 

And for once, as I laid in my bed, my thoughts were on someone other than myself and it wasn't about me. My nightmares would be for him tonight. 

If I would ever sleep again. 

With the self-destruction of the granolith went every hope and dream and desperate want that Michael had ever had. He couldn't keep wishing that there was something better out there for him, because there wasn't. And he couldn't keep wishing for home because any hope of seeing the planet that created him went to dust with the crystal. 

I remember how he looked around us, his body still shielding mine in case there would be something more, an aftershock or something else. He slid off me and looked about to break, an expression on Michael that I had never seen. The crystal turned grey and dimmed to black, the sound of it cracking was like an earthquake in the small chamber. 

I'd never seen too many of Michael's expressions. 

I didn't understand it then, I didn't even think to. I didn't really care. 

I sat with my head in my hands and I couldn't cry, my body telling me that was what I wanted to do, what I needed to do, for all of them. Except, maybe, Michael. I didn't think he needed my tears. He got to his feet and I remember watching as his hands traced the web of shatter on the crystal's surface and how it turned to dust under his fingertips and how nothing was left around us when it had gone. Nothing except the burnt, sliced corpses of the only people that ever understood either of us. 

* * *

_July 10, 2002_

_Michael's hand on her back is warm and he doesn't move to take it away as her sobs subside and she calms. She blinks back her tears and tries to make some expression that might turn him towards her. She doesn't know what it takes. She has never had to try before. _

With Max, there was never a need for seduction or pretense. He knew, in no uncertain terms, how he felt about her and although they fought their attraction and played back and forth games, he loved her and that was all that mattered. It was all that she knew. Dating before that had been childish. 

And when she was with Kyle, it wasn't about love. It was about making out in his mustang and oohhing and ahhing at his games. It was about the jock and the science geek and testing the boundaries of getting physical with another person. There was no threat of deep feelings getting in the way; it was simple and honest and nothing special. 

This was about necessity and betrayal. 

And her knowing that, and having had premeditated this meeting, made it all the more difficult to carry through with it. 

There is dark silence before he finally speaks. 

"Are you all right, Liz?" The cold spot on her back when he finally removes his hand. 

"Not really." He gives her a chance to explain her presence and she doesn't take it. 

"Well, look. If you're not going to tell me what's going on, then I want to go back to sleep. This is too weird. You should leave." He moves away from her and sits on the far end of the couch, still confused, still in the dark. She had thought he'd figured it out by now. Was her motivation so unclear? 

But he hasn't left her alone in the room yet and he doesn't make for the bedroom. He sits, quietly, his knee pulled up to his chest and his arm wrapped around it and he lets her stare at him. 

"I'm sorry, Michael. I shouldn't have come." She stands and moves in front of him squatting low so he can look into her open neckline at her flat chest as she leans enticingly towards his lap and he doesn't take her bait. 

Again, she's not really surprised. 

She thinks about Maria and knows that what she's trying to do will change everything between them and how, if Michael ever succumbs to her pathetic advances, she might never have her friendship again. It makes her sad. But it reminds her how important all of this is. 

Two strong friendships will be tested, two relationships severed. One world saved. When you put it like that, it begins to seem substantial. 

Michael watches her sedately, still tired and disconcerted, waiting her out while she makes bad excuses to herself and steadies her hands and searches for words. 

"Why are you here, Liz? This is getting tedious." Yes, it is. And she feels like a moron. But nothing ever prepared her for this, they didn't cover it in sex ed. or history. 

"I had to, I couldn't hide it any longer... the way I feel about you." She had practiced those words in front of her mirror complete with dramatic pauses and torture in her pleading eyes. Saying them in front of him, it sounds more scripted and more ridiculous than the look he gives her in return. 

"You feel about me? Jesus Christ, this is crazy. Go home, Liz." 

"I can't, please." She rests just the pads of her fingertips on his leg and hopes for electricity, something to motivate him in her direction. "Don't you feel anything for me, Michael? I know I mean something to you, I've seen it in your eyes." She hopes that everything she's ever thought about him is true and that he continues to carry the weight of his jealousy towards Max with him. It's that burden that she believes will allow him to take what Max has if it's offered to him cleanly. 

And she's offering. She's offering what Max hasn't ever had, what Max never will. 

She leans closer, wedging her chest between his bare thighs, her palms pushing up against them. 

"Liz." Michael stands and hedges away from her. There's no missing the sadness in her eyes or the desperation of the situation, he must not care. She sits back on her hands. 

"Go, Liz. Go home." He walks away from her and leaves her sitting in front of his old, ragged couch. 

She'll try again, she knows that she will and the next time, he'll believe her and realize that he can't turn her away. She'll make it better. She'll make him forget all about Maria and Max. 

He goes back to bed and she sits on his floor. At some point before the light of morning comes, she returns to the safety of her own bedroom. Failed, but forced forward. 

* * *

I think too much. I spend too much time thinking. I lay in my bed and my mind spins off on tangents that I can't avoid. For once, I'd like to lay my head down and sleep without remembering. I'd like to just sleep. 

Tonight, I'd fallen asleep with the journal open on my chest and I've woken with it clutched tight in my fingers, a cramp in my hand. 

Cigarette smoke twirls in the still air through my open window. 

Michael. I didn't hear him come, but then my mind was occupied elsewhere. I didn't know he had started smoking; why it sticks out now is beyond me. 

I roll onto my side and watch the back of his head as he sits on the edge of my rooftop staring off over the street, his fingers twitch nervously through his hair. I haven't woken up screaming, so he doesn't know that I'm awake. I had always thought that he watched me. I've never smelled smoke before. 

Things are so different. Nothing is ever what I expect. 

But I'm glad that he's here, although I don't really know why. 

"Do you always smoke?" His body jerks sharply in the sound of my voice but he doesn't turn towards me. 

"No. Sometimes. Just one more way of slowly killing myself without having to take responsibility for it, I guess." His voice is soft and monotone, no tinge of surprise where I had thought there would be. 

I can't help but crawl from my bed and move to the window where I can see him better. His back rises and falls with deep inhales on his cigarette, the exhaled smoke puffing around him. I climb out of my window, but hesitate in approaching him; something holds me back. The plastic chaise tenses under my weight with a soft noise and he finally brings his eyes to mine. 

"So?" There's a question. He asks so little and so much in the tiniest word. 

"Yeah." 

He laughs then, a somber sound from the back of his throat that cuts the quiet. I settle back, covering my shoulders with the corners of the Indian blanket that has always lain here gathering must. 

Michael puts out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe and flicks it with two fingers off the roof into the gutter below us. Strange watching him in the moonlight and shadows do what he's probably done a hundred times without my eyes on him. 

"Did you want to talk about it?" Why I'm even asking this is beyond me because I don't want to myself, but we're here, I've made it out of my bed and eventually the tension is going to cave us. I think I'm ready for sooner rather than later for once. 

"It?" There so much between us that's unsaid. "It" could be anything, so many things. "I come here a lot, I know you already know that." Michael walks across the rooftop towards me and sits on the floor at my feet. "I'm sorry about that. Really. I've never meant it as an invasion of your privacy."

"I know." I've never even thought of that before. I always knew he was there watching me from right outside my window, but I had never thought of it as an invasion. I just knew that he was there and it didn't bother me. It reminded me. 

"What are we going to do with ourselves, Liz? I can't keep reliving the past and I don't know what the future should be anymore." There's a thin rivulet of dried blood on the side of his hand, cracked and dark. 

I can pretend not to notice and allow my own pain to supercede his, but I know that I won't. My own hand reaches out to his and I turn it around in my palm. Michael's temperature has always run hotter than my own. "Does it help?" I hear myself ask. 

"No. Yeah... Sometimes. I don't know. It reminds me. That kinda helps, sometimes. You know, everything didn't have to stop dead in its tracks when... it happened. I should have done something, I should have taken my position and tried to find who ever was left and make them come to me. I've wasted so much time." 

"And what would you have done if you'd found something? Would you have avenged their deaths? Would you have forced them to take you home? What would you have done?" He's probably asked himself the same questions, but I have to ask him anyway. If for nothing else than to hear my own voice. We don't even know if their deaths were accidental or if it was all part of some enemy plan. 

No one ever knew the location of the granolith except the seven of us. 

"I don't know. I just know that I should have done something other than sit here like a fucking coward. This was never me." Michael bites down on his lip, digging his teeth deep into his skin. 

"You're not a coward," I whisper. Sorry, but that role is taken. I'll admit to it freely. 

"Yeah, right." We could lob this one back and forth all night, each of us feeling more sorry for ourselves than the other. I'm getting tired of it. 

"Michael, as much as I've beaten myself up over all of this a thousand times, it wasn't our fault. Not really. We could never have known what was going to happen." In the therapy sessions in my mind -- the ones where I can tell everything, where I can recount every story and every living detail -- that's what I tell myself at the end. And although I don't really believe it, I do. Occasionally. 

"I should have been there." Michael scrapes at his congealed blood, picking it off his skin with too long nails. 

"We both should have." But I'm not sure if I believe that at all. 

I used to believe in god. I used to believe that even if there wasn't a divine plan for each of us, there was a route that we were probably meant to take in life. Not destiny, but a variation on karma. That each of us was born to this world an empty receptacle and little by little it was filled through our progression down the path. There was just right or wrong, right or left. Each step changed only the little things. Each step moved closer to the objective. 

My path kept me alive. More than once. And even if there is no god, or even if there is, there's a reason why I'm alive still. I'm just waiting to figure out why. 

"No, Liz. You're not listening to me. It's not about being however many minutes late together, it's about being together at all. We shouldn't have been together in the first place and I should have been with them. If all four of us had been there, this never would have happened. We'd all still be alive, we might even be home." 

Michael closes his eyes slowly and takes a deep breath, standing and walking away from me. And when I reach out my hand to stop him, he still inches further. 

He's never known why I came to him. 

I never wanted him to know. 

I still don't. 

"But the past will always be the past, Michael. And we can't change it." Smart words I should listen to myself. I think I've heard them once before. 

With Max gone and the world still turning, what would the point of delivering my grand design to Michael be other than to hurt him? 

"So that should mean 'no regrets'? I can't do that. I just can't. I have so many." When he approaches me again, I can feel my lips trembling and my tears gathering in my eyes. Poor Michael, poor me, poor all of us. Poor me. Poor years between then and now -- and then. 

* * *

Even after he left me, I sat outside in the same spot. Not moving. Barely breathing. 

I wonder if he knew everything, whether it would make any difference. We both have our own versions of the truth and neither of them are factual. Truth never is. Truth is subjective. Memories and emotion color truth and truth changes every day. No one needs to know my truth but me. 

Michael's made me look at his, but that doesn't mean that I have to do the same. 

My truth begins and ends with me. And his does nothing to change mine. They're the same but entirely different. 

Call me selfish. I've stopped caring. 

Some things are meant to be kept inside. Wrapped in soft tissue and coarse twine and packaged up. Tucked deep away. I won't pull it out and I won't look at it with anyone else around. Mine. 

The sun comes up and the sky goes from a dark and husky indigo, touching the spectrum back to a bright blue. 

Eventually, I go inside. I'm not tired. 

* * *

Michael draws Maria with blacked out eyes. 

I've become desensitized. Insensitive. 

* * *

**That I Might See**  
**Part Four**  


* * *

I may be stronger now, but I have no strength. 

Max used to tell me that there was nothing that could ever get in the way of us, of the love that we had for each other. I used to tell him that he was wrong. I told him that what we thought was love was an illusion. A chimera that we created when we needed an explanation for the bond we felt after he saved my life. 

He would argue that he had always loved me. Long before he even knew what his feelings meant, he'd had them. 

I would tell him that he was lying to himself. I told him that I never loved him the way that he thought that he loved me. 

Who was really lying to themselves? 

Of course I loved him. Of course I felt the same things he did. Of course. 

But that would never have mattered. And it certainly doesn't matter now. 

There was nothing more that I wanted than to feel him in my arms, our heated skin pressed against each other's and that moment of completion when he finally sunk inside me. I wanted to make love to him, with him. I wanted to share everything with him. 

I may be able to talk, but I have nothing to say. 

When I dress and go downstairs to open the restaurant, my hands are shaking from lack of sleep and my eyes are heavy. But I'm not tired. The memories are keeping me awake. 

I've tried for so long to not remember; facing the recall doesn't feel any better. Michael has faced his retrospection, where has it gotten him? Michael has made his memories part of him, mine fight to leave me. 

I try not to think about Isabel's voice in the flashes, the way that she screamed for Michael. The way that all of their voices melded into one that sounded like hers but separated in shards of each of them. I try to forget that Alex howled her name as he watched her go first. 

Poor Alex. I brought him into this and I watched him go. 

Max must have known something was wrong when he called everyone together that day. Before that, we had all slowly -- teeny inch by teeny inch -- begun to pull away from each other. It was exactly what we needed. 

But he still so desperately loved me. Those days, it was Max I would hear on my rooftop some nights while I slept. And Max's eyes that I would feel searing into the back of my head as I flitted around the Crashdown like I do today. Like I do everyday. 

I tried to make him not love me. And I tried even harder not to love him back. 

They say love conquers all, but I know how wrong they are. Love conquers nothing. Unless you count the Earth. Or was it the entire Universe? I don't remember anymore. 

Some days, even in summer when the air is hot, the Crashdown is so cold. 

I used to love the summer. I loved the windless air and the longer days and the way nobody had to wear sweaters and coats. I would put on a tank top and shorts and sit on my roof and watch the heat rise off the black tar street. 

I used to love a lot of things. Now I love nothing at all. 

* * *

_July 12, 2002_

_The summer air is thick. She looks around furtively before ducking into the blazing hot kitchen and moving close to him. His senses aren't tuned to her, he doesn't listen for her footsteps, he doesn't feel her near him. _

Behind him, so close, she watches a drop of sweat ease its way down the back of his neck. Her hands are bolder than her heart. She traces it with her fingertip and he turns around, catches her with his hand. She steps closer. 

She whispers his name so even he has to strain to hear her. She wets her lips. 

He glances over his shoulder, through the order window, out into the cafe. No one is watching. 

"You have to stop this, Liz. What if Maria..." He looks back again. No one is watching. Why would anyone watch? 

"I don't care." But she looks too, and no one is watching. And she does care. But she knows what's more important. 

"But I do." He turns back to the fryer. 

She's not going to let him get by her this easily. It's getting easier. She's getting easier. He's making it easier. 

"No, you don't." She's playing a little game with him, hoping that he'll play along. She thinks he likes it. She's watched the same cat and mouse thing between he and Maria for years. He likes to be chased and he likes to be caught. Like the scientist inside her, she has done her research and hypothesized and charted and planned. 

The sweat drips again and she stands up on tip toes and snatches it from his skin with the tip of her tongue in a flash of pink. She feigns that she has any idea what she's doing. She pretends that the embarrassment isn't flushed hot in her cheeks. He doesn't move, his eyes plastered on the dining room. She reaches around him and presses her thumb and the side of her palm into his chest slowly, slight pressure increasing. 

"Stop, Liz. Please." Her other hand presses against his thigh easing downward. They both watch over the dining room, eyes scanning the floor. Maria pays no attention to the kitchen. Why would she? 

"No one's watching, Michael." She whispers into his ear and lashes her tongue out again. "No one can see." 

"You're out of your mind." 

"Yes." Yes. Completely. And entirely sane and entirely calculating and entirely screwed. 

And she pulls back and away with a twirl and recedes to the floor. Her customers are waiting. 

* * *

Another day, another few feet towards the grave. That's what we're all waiting for, right? 

For some reason, even working can't seem to take over my thoughts today and I hate it. I'm used to coming down here and having nothing in there but air and orders and numbered tables. And I prefer it that way. 

Before, I could measure the day in the steps that it took me to get from table to table, mentally trying to beat my own best and rerouting for the lesser count. Numbers flying through my brain and keeping it occupied. Today, the numbers and mathematics have failed me. Just when I need their comfort most. 

And I can't keep my head straight. 

Order up in the window. Deliver pie to table six, burger and chicken salad to twelve. Shortest distance between the two? Maria's twisted face and the way her vocal chords warbled when she screamed. How it almost sounded like singing when all of their voices meshed. 

Michael described it as the most horrible sound he'd ever heard -- ever imagined hearing -- next to the sound of the granolith dying. Strange how I remember thinking that it was beautiful. 

I'm a monster. 

He blames us both. He's written it in exactly those words. But we had nothing to do with what happened. The only fault that is ours is that we weren't there and that we were too late to save them. Had we been able to save them at all. 

If he wants to lay blame, he should blame Max for beginning without us. Without Michael. I don't want anyone's blame anymore, it's not mine to have. I was just trying to save the world. 

Table ten needs more coffee. Mrs. Kingley needs her order taken. I need to go upstairs and lie down; my head is throbbing. The lunch rush will be over soon. 

I've thought it all through now and I've made some decisions based on my memories and the glimpse I've had into Michael's. We couldn't have done anything. Had we been there, standing beside them in a circle around the stone, we would have surely been sliced to burnt bits too much like bacon right along with them. 

They couldn't have avoided it; we couldn't have either. It's silly to think otherwise. I am not a superhero and, as much as he would like to think otherwise, neither is Michael. 

For two hours before I came down here I sat on the edge of my bed and fingered the soft, torn edges of a page that Michael didn't want me to see. I wondered what he thought he needed to hold back. Handing over everything inside him that he could put down on thick paper, there was still something that he wanted to keep to secret for only himself. 

Surprising. And curious. 

With everything else that he's given me, I can't stop thinking about whatever it was that he kept. My selfishness makes whatever the missing detail is the most important thing. The one thing that could save both of us. Because nothing else here makes me think otherwise. 

Funny thing though, I know there's nothing out there that can save me. 

* * *

Two years ago tomorrow. Two years ago tomorrow. Two years ago tomorrow. Two years ago tomorrow. Two years ago tomorrow. Two years ago tomorrow. Two years ago tomorrow. 

If tomorrow ever comes. 

I don't want to wake up. 

I don't want to wake up alone. 

I skipped my appointment today. Really just didn't want to talk and there would have been too much to say. My caring doctor has left six messages. 

* * *

_July 13, 2002_

_She waits on his stairs knowing he'll be home soon and that he'll be alone. The manager in her knows how to grease the schedules, knows exactly where he will be and where Maria won't. _

This would hurt her. Everything would hurt all of them. 

He slides up onto the curb and parks his bike beside the building, his helmet shielding his peripheral vision so he doesn't see her. But she knows that he's expecting her. After the amount of harassment she's been giving him, the not-so-subtle innuendo she's been floating his way and the way that she's taken every opportunity to touch him, there's no where else she would be. 

His facade has cracked wide open. In a way, she thinks he's almost happy that she wants him. That he thinks she wants him. 

No matter. Same thing. 

He chains the helmet to his bike pretending to still not see her there, maybe working out whatever he's got to to see his way through this. She watches his slow movements, his hands winding the links around the wheel spokes and through the helmet's visor. 

When he turns to face the building, he finally acknowledges her presence. It's not a frown, but it ain't no smile either. She feels her nervousness rise again. 

He'll break, she knows that he will. 

She stands as he approaches, a sheepish smile on her apprehensive lips. This has become a neurotic game to her and she can only imagine what goes through his mind. Has he finally decided to want her? Has he realized that he has no choice? 

When reaches her, he says nothing and opens the door holding it for her to enter. She keeps her mouth closed as well, glad that the words she prepared don't have to be used. She can save them up for later if she still needs them. Better to save up as much as possible. 

She hopes she won't need them. 

She leads him to his own apartment and moves aside when they reach his door. His hand to the lock, the red glow as it snaps open. Veins standing out on the back of his palm betraying his calm. He never really looks at her. Over her and occasionally through her, but hardly at. 

When the door is closed behind her and he leans his back against it, deep breaths rising his chest, she steps to him. One hand on each side of his face. 

Michael has always been beautiful but that doesn't make any of this easier. Certainly doesn't make it right. There is no right here. But she lifts herself closer to him and touches her lips lightly to his feeling them part beneath her weight. He does nothing to encourage her but nothing to stop her. 

Middle ground is good enough. 

Her heart thumps in her chest, her hands shake, her tongue slides into his mouth and moves slowly against his. She sees Maria's fiery eyes stare back at her behind her eyelids. She sees the hurt in Max's entire being. 

Doesn't stop her from doing what she has to do. 

Michael's body responds to her. She can feel that he tries to hold back but eventually his arms are around her waist and he presses his mouth harder against hers, their teeth fight an angry battle. 

She remembers his words, so long ago. 'Thanks for giving me another reason to envy Max Evans.' She knew she could play that. She knew it would work. She knew that Michael always wanted everything Max had. Max has never really had everything. 

When they break for air, she holds her hands out to him and leads him to the couch, backing him into it. 

"Liz..." His voice cracks and he shakes his head in disbelief, or something. 

"Don't Michael. Don't ruin it." She eases herself onto his lap and crushes her lips to his again. It is hot. Desperation fosters passion. Fear urges forward motion. 

An object in motion will stay in motion. 

She scratches and she bites careful to only leave light marks. Marks that will fade before she leaves him. 

His eyes never lose the question. His hands travel her back, grip tight on the back of her neck. When the phone rings, he ignores it. When Maria's voice travels through the small apartment, that unmistakable lilt of conscious sexiness filling the air around them, they both pretend not to hear. 

She's winning. She will save the Earth. Max will understand, years later, that she did love him and she did everything that she did, is doing, all for him. He will know that she hurt herself far more than he was ever hurt. 

And Michael, he's only a pawn. 

This saddens her, because he should be more than carrion for her teeth. He's not a bad person and he's never deserved this level of deception. But he's there for the slaughter, has left himself open for it. 

And he's Max's best friend, almost his brother. The one and only person who can make Max really see, really see that she ultimately does not love him. 

And if that means that she has to give Michael what Max should have been given, then so be it. 

* * *

I can't sleep. 

It was this hot that night two years ago and I didn't sleep that night either. But then I wasn't reliving old memories and letting the ghosts taunt me. Then I was making the ghosts. But not mine. 

I've gotten through most of Michael's agitated scribblings. Each time I attempt to put them down, I pick them back up again. And my fingers go back to the torn away pages and I read on again, hoping that whatever he's kept hidden is alluded to somewhere else in the text. 

He's seen me finger those pages. I heard him out there again. 

But then he left. 

It's better that he's left. I need to be alone tonight. All alone. With my thoughts, with his, with everything and nothing else. 

* * *

_July 13, 2002_

_What Max should have shared. _

With her eyes closed she can pretend that Michael is Max, but it doesn't work. Their skin feels different under the pads of her fingers. Their hair different as it scratches at her face as he bends his lips to her throat. Her responses are different, too. 

They surprise her more. 

When it had been Max, she knew what she was supposed to feel. Her responses were never planned, but they never shocked her. They were precisely as they should be. Her nipples peaking to the slide of his fingers across the silken wisp of her bra. That moisture between her legs as he cupped her face in his hands and lapped at her lips. 

She had put so much planning and in-front-of-the-mirror rehearsal into this night and Michael was throwing everything off with... what? Passion? No, not passion. Never passion. Michael's lips move almost mechanically, as if he wants it over with as badly as she does. 

As if he knows everything. 

But he doesn't know anything and, increasingly, neither does she. She lets her hands move less awkwardly over his shoulders and grasps the back of his neck pulling him harder closer deeper. Into her. She wants him as close as possible, her eyes crushed so tight that she can block him out. Pretend. Pretend. Pretend. 

"Michael..." 

"Don't Liz. Don't ruin it." So he does know it's her. He doesn't pretend. She thinks? 

She moves slightly back and takes his hand, rough fingers, under her shirt leading them blindly to her breast. To the clasp of her bra. Guiding his fingers to open it for her, her fingers laced through his and helping. Actually helping. Not Max. Michael. She knows it's wrong, but it's becoming more right. And it bothers her. 

Her top bunches and wrinkles beside them after she takes it off. The bra hits the floor. 

As his hands close over her and she settles harder into his lap, she tries her damnedest not to think of anything at all. 

It will all be over soon, she thinks. But she doesn't know how right she is about that. 

* * *

It's my turn to sit outside my own window and stare inside my empty room. My parents are asleep, Michael is where ever Michael goes and the rest of them are all dead and buried. 

There were never any autopsies. Sheriff Valenti had made sure of it. After we had moved the bodies to Max's jeep and sent it at seventy miles an hour crashing through the side of the Supermarket, Michael and I disappeared back to his house and pretended for all the world that we had seen nothing. 

The death certificates would show that the bodies were near unrecognizable. Near. 

Phone records would show, if anyone looked, that the Sheriff had called to notify us. Him. 

Phone records would also show a call from the Evans house, one hour and twenty-five minutes before the actual time of death. We hadn't heard the telephone; I had turned off the ringer and the sound on Michael's machine. So maybe it was my fault. I really don't care anymore. 

I wasn't home to receive my call, but he left a message there as well. I still have the tape. The quality is worn and sounds pale and scratched, but you can still hear the despondency and anxiety in Max's voice calling me to the desert, to the chamber where they were born. He needed us. 

It doesn't make any difference in the long run. 

What is the long run? I've always wondered about colloquialisms like that. They never make any sense. In the long run. 

In the dark, the air turns cooler. 

My skin itches, my nails rake over my arms. 

* * *

_July 13, 2002_

_ It's late. Later than she thought it would be. Almost midnight. _

She gets caught up in the feeling of hands on her body, hands in places where only her own had ever been. She gets caught up in her own shame. And she remembers, distinctly, why she's there as her first orgasm with someone else in the room builds to a shivering crest. 

Michael keeps his eyes closed. 

They remain together though; legs entwined on his couch, the rough weave scraping her bare skin. And Michael's eyes, when they're open, scan everything except her. 

They both feel the thickness in the air of everything she's not saying and everything that he's ignoring, and she knows it. She can taste his anger with himself on the back of her tongue. 

But neither of them says anything and when it seems that the moment is going to come when one of them will break the silence, she leans in and kisses him again. It's better to just try and get through it. It's easier that way. And she's sparing him. 

When will the door lock click open and one of the others will walk in on them? When will Michael fall so deeply into her trap that he has to tell someone? She hasn't thought it out this far, she realizes now. 

The greatest betrayal is to make love to the man that is the love of your life's best friend. She's not ready for that just yet though. 

But she's getting closer. And she's already given so much of herself to Michael that she should have saved for herself. 

Should the world have to fall to war just because she's selfish? 

Should anyone's life really be filled with this type of over-dramatic science non-fiction? 

"Bedroom, Michael." 

He pulls away from her and looks back towards the room in question and she can't tell what he's thinking. That's painful in and of itself. Does he weigh her offer in terms of what's important to him or can he think with his nether regions like the rest of the world? Maybe if he stops thinking entirely, she can get them past this. 

She leans into him once more, her lips softly brushing his and her tongue slipping between them to beat at his teeth. A low hum from deep in her chest tells him what she wants. She reiterates with her hand traveling his thigh and rubbing hard against the crotch of his pants. 

"I don't know about this, Liz." He says in rapid pants into her mouth. 

"What's there to know about? I want you, Michael. Forget about everything else." It sounds straight from the pages of a cheap romance novel. It probably is. 

Self-loathing is lovely. Self-loathing coats the roof of your mouth with sheer, viscous everything bad. Self-loathing rises and takes Michael's hand and pulls him up to standing. She leads him to his own room knowing she'll have no idea what to do once they get there. 

They pass the telephone table and she catches him as he notices the blinking "2". 

"Two messages?" He mumbles, dropping her hand. A cold draft wafts over her skin and she trembles; her skin rises up in goosebumps. Now aware of her toplessness, her almost bottomlessness. 

The mechanical voice cuts through them both, Michael's finger on the volume dial. 

> --ou have two messages:   
*beep*  
"Michael. Where are you? We need to be at the pod chamber, all of us, together. Damnit. Where are you? I'm going to call Liz and Tess and then head out there with Isabel. Get there as soon as possible. Immediately. Michael... This is really important. Shit. Where are you?" 

Michael looks at her then with something near tears in his eyes. Reads as guilt. 

All she can think is how easy it's always been for Max to say her name and Tess' in one breath. It should have been harder. But then, if it was, she'd be at home nestled in her bed and not seducing Michael to save the world. And he would be with Tess. And everything would be fine. Or something. 

Michael grabs her wrist and turns it to him looking at her watch. 

"Let's go. It's only been twenty minutes since the call came. What can we tell them?" Michael paces, picking up bits of clothing and throwing them back on. Tossing her bits at her feet. "Come on. Shit." 

"Maybe we shouldn't arrive together?" Her voice has a lilt to it. She pushes him. 

"No, we'll think of something. I'll think of... something. Come on. Get dressed, damnit." Michael's voice is angry and agitated, his eyes flitting around the room and ignoring hers. He's put himself back together and looks as if his clothes were never wrinkled under him on the couch. 

* * *

She sits behind him on the back of his dirtbike, her arms wrapped around his waist and her head buried in the crook of his neck. She's scared of the wind and the speed. 

One, bright headlamp illuminating the dark back road to the desert, no one else around them. 

She whispers into the rushing air, thin, mascara-ed tears running down her face and whooshing behind her. "I'm sorry..." And she is. Sorry. 

They pull off the tarred road and head deeper into the desert. She lets her face dry in the cooling air rushing past her. He's mumbling into it, she can't make out the words. 

They can see it ahead of them. He slows down, he stops. 

"What are you doing?" She brushes her hair from her face and tucks it back under the helmet. Her eyes dart stealthily towards the area where the chamber is hidden and back towards his. 

"Look. I just want to make something completely clear." His voice shakes and betrays the countenance he tries to hold tight. "Nothing happened between us. Nothing is going to happen between us and the only reason we're together is because you came over to help me with something. We're not going to explain anything to anyone and no one is going to ask any questions. Because everything is normal and it's not so strange that we're together. Got it?" 

"Sure." She smirks at him and leans tighter into him on the small seat clutching him tighter with her thighs. "Nothing. Right." 

The engine whirrs and he makes the rest of the journey. It's seconds. 

She wants them to all know, she thinks that she couldn't have planned this any better. The marks from his teeth on her neck are dark and visible. And they will be, even in the dim light of the chamber. She'll tip her neck to them just to make sure that they see. She'll tip her body towards his and they'll know just where the bites came from. 

Then, they'll know. Max will know. And he'll finally, finally, finally stop loving her because she betrayed him. She's stopped caring what it means to Michael's relationship with Max. They're practically brothers; Max will eventually get over it. They all will. 

Maybe not Maria, but she hopes. And soon she'll finally leave Roswell and go to college and move on with her life putting all talk and memory of aliens behind her. The applications are stamped and ready and piled on her desk. It's only a matter of time. Not so much time. 

When they enter the chamber, she hears their muffled voices beyond the pods. 

When they creep through, there is just a split second. The look of both relief and confusion on Max's face as they start to enter, Isabel's smile as she sees us arrive. Then, the flash. And the beam cutting through the room, slicing through everything in its path in a circle around the granolith. 

She's beneath Michael on the ground. And it's over. There's only smoke and stench and the memories of screams. It takes only a moment, but it seems like a lifetime. In slow motion. 

She had seen all of their faces. She had heard the cacophony that was their voices in terror and pain. She had watched it all. 

* * *

It's late. Later than I thought it would be. Almost midnight. 

I had hoped that I would be able to sleep through the exact minute that would be their anniversary. I still remember how I got through this last year. Last year, I drank a bottle of my father's scotch and passed out in my bed. Missed it completely and hardly remembered the next day. 

Throwing up made it all easier. 

No luxury of that this time around. I'm almost twenty-one. I'm half-dead. 

Fourteen steps back inside my bedroom and onto my bed. Pillows drown out nothing when everything is inside your head. No matter how tightly you clasp them to your ears. 

Can't get away from what's inside you. 

And it's not about fault and it's not about blame and it's not about love. It's about life. And sometimes life just has to end. A scientist could tell you that, that some things just have a life expectancy of a certain amount of time. It goes no further than that. Some live a little longer, some a little shorter. 

The life expectancy for a Liz Parker is surprisingly short. The life expectancy for a Liz Parker is twenty-one years. 

Give or take. 

It should be dramatic though, don't you think? It should be done with a certain amount of cinematic flair worthy of the melodrama I've put everyone around me through over the past two years minus two and a half hours. 

Give or take. 

I still have his knife. The one that I gave him that he gave back to me. The blade is still just sharp enough. Inscribed for him. Poetic, almost. 

It should hurt, but it doesn't. Numb for so long. I slice in the correct direction, one wrist then the next and lie back on my bed; my head hits the pillow with a soft thud. 

It doesn't hurt. I would have thought it would hurt. 

Surreal swirls of color and I can almost stop thinking of them. I forgive them. I forgive everything. I'll be forgiven. 

The weakness in my body is the first sign that I've done anything at all. Words hard to form on my tongue bright bulb lamp drip drip darker bedroom better squinted through Venetian eyelashes. The roof is still lit with fairy lights burning candle. 

It's soft. Not soft like a kitten. Soft like lips swallowing pressing breathing. I can feel it move. I can feel it breathe. Soon. Sticky. 

My mind imagines Michael out past my window, his eyes sad and broken the way that they were when we watched the granolith self-destruct. Self-destruct. Self. Destruct. I plead with the image to let me go. 

And I'm finally tired. And it's almost time. Almost. 

* * *

END

* * *

**That I Might See**  
**Epilogue**  


* * *

July 14, 2004

Yeah. 

I could have saved her. 

I didn't. 

I let her set me free. And I'm leaving Roswell. Finally. 

There was nothing that she couldn't have read on those pages that she wondered about. Nothing that was all that important. I left her the pages when I took back this book. 

Three drawings. The only color drawings in the book. Liz and Maria like they were in High School, happy and dancing and smiling and beautiful. Holding hands. 

I didn't not want her to see them; I wanted to keep them for myself. 

It was selfish. We're allowed to be selfish. Fuck. 

I let her be selfish more than once. 

Allowing her to die was both of our last selfish and completely selfless acts. They let you have both at the same time only once in your life and you have to take the chance when you can. 

I feel good about it. 

Almost. 

* * *

   [1]: mailto:pilar@chickmail.com



End file.
